"I recognize that it [China] is
becoming a considerable threat." -
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso

For
some of us in the China-watching business (I have
been there for more than 40 years), there has
always been a China "threat". It began with the
1950-53 Korean civil war, which initially had
nothing to do with China.

Indeed, if any
outside power was involved in North Korea's attack

on its
rival government in the South, it was the Soviet
Union, not China. The communist regime in Beijing
had just come to power after a protracted civil
war with the rival Kuomintang (KMT) regime. Its
troops were being moved to the south of the
country, far from Korea, in preparation for the
final attack on the KMT enemy, which had fled to
Taiwan.

Even so, Beijing was blamed. As
punishment, Washington withdrew its earlier pledge
not to get involved in China's civil war and
called for a KMT counterattack against the
mainland.

It would also threaten Beijing
more directly, by sending troops close to China's
border with Korea in late 1950. When China then
moved its own troops into Korea, the China-threat
people moved into high gear. Images of hordes of
Chinese troops relentlessly pushing US forces
southward down the Korean Peninsula followed by
two years of military stalemate were to lay the
groundwork for two decades of US and other Western
policies calling for the containment and
non-recognition of Beijing.

The next China
threat was supposed to operate via the overseas
Chinese in Southeast Asia. Coping with that
"threat" meant the West had to prop up a range of
incompetent, corrupt rulers in the area, and
intervene cruelly to suppress revolts by local
Chinese against discrimination in Malaya and then
in Sarawak.

It also meant that the United
States, Britain and Australia would work very hard
to prevent the 1959 election of an intelligent
Chinese, Lee Kwan Yew, to the Singapore
premiership. Lee was seen, amazingly, as a front
for Beijing and Chinese communism. The three
Western powers threw their support and secret
funds behind Lee's pro-Western rival, Lim Yew
Hock, whom Lee easily defeated. (Lee subsequently
sent Lim as ambassador to Canberra, where he
served for some months before abandoning his
embassy and disappearing into a Sydney red-light
area, leading to his recall.)

The
China-threat lobby moved into overdrive over
Vietnam in the early 1960s. There a civil war in
the South supported by North Vietnam was denounced
by Washington and Canberra as the first step in
Beijing's planned "aggression" into Southeast Asia
- despite the fact that as in Korea, Moscow's
support for the pro-communist side in that civil
war was much greater than China's. However,
Beijing's rhetoric supporting the war was seen as
proof of China's guilt.

One result was
that, in 1964, I had the task of accompanying an
Australian foreign minister, Paul Hasluck, in a
foolish, US-instigated bid to persuade the Soviet
Union to side with the West against those
aggressive Chinese. The US, and Australia, had
decided that the Sino-Soviet polemics of the time
proved that Moscow was on the side of moderation
and detente with the West while Beijing was
committed to aggressive support for pro-communist
revolts worldwide.

Hasluck labored on
about how China was threatening not just Asia but
also Soviet territories in Central Asia and the
Far East. He gave up only after being told bluntly
by the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, that
Moscow was doing all it could to help North
Vietnam in its just struggle against US
imperialism, would continue to do so, and would
like to see Beijing doing a lot more.

In
1962, as China desk officer in Canberra, I had to
witness an extraordinary attempt to label as
unprovoked aggression a very limited and justified
Chinese counterattack against an Indian military
thrust across the Indian-claimed borderline in the
North East Frontier Area.

Threat scenarios
then had China seeking ocean access via the Bay of
Bengal. The London Economist even had Beijing
seeking to move south via Afghanistan.

Then came the allegations that China was
seeking footholds in Laos, northern Thailand and
Myanmar - all false. US, British and Australian
encouragement for the 1965 massacre of up to half
a million left-wing supporters in Indonesia was
also justified as needed to prevent China from
gaining a foothold there.

So too was the
United States' and Australia's 1975 approval for
Indonesia's brutal invasion and takeover of East
Timor. Both saw Fretilin, then the main political
party opposed to the Portuguese colonial regime
and seeking independence, as a dangerous left-wing
grouping that might turn to China for support.

Beijing's moves to prevent Taiwan
independence have also been condemned as
aggressive, despite the fact that every Western
nation, including the US, has formally recognized
or accepted that Taiwan is part of a nation called
China in which Beijing's is the sole legitimate
government.

China's efforts to assert
control over Tibet were also branded as
aggression, even though Tibet has never been
recognized as an independent entity. True, many
have the right to be upset over the crude way in
which Beijing asserted control over Tibet. But
many also forget that some of that crudity was the
result of an abortive attempt by the US Central
Intelligence Agency and New Delhi to stir up a
revolt in the area.

The cruelty and damage
caused by China's Great Leap Forward in the late
1960s, the Cultural Revolution in the late '70s,
and the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 also provoked
alarm among some China watchers. But these were
internal, not external, events.

And so it
continues to the present day. With the alleged
Soviet threat to Japan having evaporated, we now
have an army of Japanese and US hawks - Foreign
Minister Taro Aso included - ramping up China as
an alleged threat to Japan and the Far East.

Much is made of Beijing's recent increases
in military spending. But those increases began
from a very low base; until recently its military
was largely concerned with running companies and
growing its own vegetables. Today Beijing faces a
US-Japan military buildup in East Asia for which
the spending far exceeds China's. Tokyo and
Washington have a strategic military alliance that
specifically targets China over Taiwan, and
possibly other parts of East Asia. For Beijing to
ignore these facts would be surprising, to say the
least.

The US and Japan justify this
military buildup partly as needed to contain the
potential threat from China. And if the Chinese
military were placing bases and sending spy planes
and ships close to the US coast, were encouraging
Hawaiian independence, and were bombing US
embassies, the US role in that buildup might be
justified. But so far that has not happened.

All at sea about maritime
boundariesThe China "threat" to Japan is
supposed to involve maritime borders in the East
China Sea. Tokyo has unilaterally decreed that its
exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in that area extends
to the median line between the Chinese coastline
and the Ryukyu Islands. It claims sole right to
develop potential oil and gas reserves in this
claimed EEZ and its strategists urge punitive
action against any Chinese challenge to that
right. Even Chinese developments on the Chinese
side of that median line are threatened on the
basis that they might take gas from underground
reserves on the Japanese side of the claimed line.

Beijing disputes Tokyo's EEZ claim. It
says the continental shelf extending all the way
to the Okinawa Trough, or well within the EEZ
claimed by Japan, should be the basis for deciding
the EEZ boundary. But it makes no move to assert
control over the disputed area. Instead it calls
for agreement on joint undersea development in the
area between the two rival claim lines, at least
until the rival claims have been settled.

Who is right? The 1982 United Nations Law
of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) that created the
EEZ concept simply says international law should
be the basis for deciding conflicting claims. But
international law is vague. In the past it
endorsed the continental-shelf approach as the
main basis for delimiting maritime boundaries. But
recently it has begun to favor the median- or
equidistance-line approach. However, it also goes
on to say that any equidistance approach should be
equitable to both sides. One example of equity in
the equidistance approach was the recent
Libya/Malta judgment in which Libya was favored
because of its greater land mass. In this as in
several other similar cases, the International
Court of Justice has ruled that "the equidistance
line is not mandatory or binding". It says that
the "proportionality of coastlines" is also a
factor.

In theory at least, this
proportionality ruling would seem to favor China.
The pending Australia-East Timor agreement also
raises doubts about Japan's blunt rejection of
Beijing's proposals. The continental shelf was the
basis for the original Australian-Indonesian
maritime boundary agreement reached back in 1972.
It favored Australia greatly, since the Timor
Trough that defines the shelf runs close to the
Indonesian and Timorese coastlines.

Then
as extensive oil and gas reserves were found on
the shelf between Australia and East Timor (which
was incorporated forcefully into Indonesia in
1975), there were demands for the equidistance
line to be used. When East Timor gained
independence from Indonesia in 2002, the demands
grew even louder.

But Canberra still
insists on the continental-shelf line agreed
earlier with Indonesia. However, and as a
concession, it has agreed to revenue sharing from
developing some oil and gas reserves between the
equidistance line and the original
continental-shelf line, a position somewhat
similar to what China proposes today in the East
China Sea.

An even stronger precedent was
created by Tokyo itself. Japan and South Korea
used to have rival equidistance and
continental-shelf claims against each other. Then
in 1974 they agreed to disagree, and to decide the
matter some time in the future (the year 2028 was
mentioned). In the meantime they agreed to joint
development in the area between the two claimed
lines. That 1974 agreement was confirmed as late
as August 2002, by an accord for a specific oil
co-exploration project on the continental shelf
between the two nations. Like Beijing's, Seoul's
continental-shelf claim extends to the Okinawa
Trough.

Jon Van Dyke of the William S
Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaii at
Manoa, and the foremost expert on Japan-China and
Japan-Korea sea boundaries, agrees that the
equidistance principle is now dominant. But he
adds that in cases of disagreement "it may be
appropriate to resolve some of them with shared or
joint-use zones of some sort".

The 1982
UNCLOS says specifically that in cases of
disagreement, "the states concerned shall make
every effort to enter into provisional
arrangements of a practical nature". Beijing's
joint-development proposal in the disputed area
would seem to match that principle. Tokyo's
hardline approach that says everything is already
decided would seem to contradict it.

Ironically, as late as 1994 Tokyo agreed
to joint fisheries exploitation with China and
South Korea in the East China Sea pending what it
then agreed was the need for final EEZ
delimitations. But today it insists that the
Japan-China EEZ has indeed been finally delimited
- not by negotiation but by unilateral fiat.

Tokyo takes an equally hard line in its
Senkaku Islands dispute with Beijing (which calls
the islands Diaoyu) - a dispute in which the
Chinese/Taiwanese claims are not without
historical validity, and would have even more
validity under Beijing's continental-shelf
approach.

Tokyo moves from the hard line
to the absurd in its claim to 200-nautical-mile
EEZ rights in every direction from a minuscule and
remote Pacific Ocean rock far to the east of Japan
that it calls Okinotori Island. Its claim flies in
the face of Article 121 (3) of UNCLOS, which
states clearly that small rocks and even
uninhabited islands cannot have an EEZ.

What we see in all this is the ease with
which Japan's positions on territorial questions
harden once subjected to the glare of publicity.
In backroom deals Tokyo can show reasonable
flexibility.

For example, in both 1955 and
1956 Tokyo was on the point of reaching a
closed-door compromise settlement of its nagging
territorial dispute with Moscow. Tokyo would
receive two of the four disputed island
territories (Shikotan and the Habomais), ie, it
would accept continued Soviet control of the
larger islands of Etorufu and Kunashiri, over
which Japan had specifically renounced all right
and title under the 1951 San Francisco peace
agreement (but to which in 1953 it revived a
claim).

Both times Japan's hardliners were
able to drag the compromise agreements into the
light of media and right-wing scrutiny. Overnight
the compromises were condemned as sellouts of the
Japanese national interest. A similar backroom
compromise proposal organized by the Liberal
Democratic Party politician Suzuki Muneo in 1999
during prime minister Mori Yoshiro's
administration met the same fate. The Foreign
Ministry officials involved have all been forced
into exile.

For a while there were signs
that Foreign Ministry moderates were also willing
to go along with Beijing's 1970s suggestion that
the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands ownership dispute be
shelved for the next generation to solve. But
Japan's right wing quickly put an end to that
common-sense suggestion. Led by Tokyo Governor
Ishihara Shintaro, they have also done much to
force Tokyo into its absurdly defiant position
over the Okinotori rock. Public opinion in Japan
seems unable to comprehend that there can be two
sides to a dispute, especially when territory is
involved. Even at the height of Canberra's dispute
with East Timor, responsible Australian media were
always careful to refer to the "claimed"
Australian EEZ line. The Timorese case was
presented objectively. Meanwhile in Japan the
media and the commentators take it for granted
that Japan's median-line EEZ claim in the East
China Sea is totally correct. Even the supposedly
impartial NHK forgets to use the word "claimed".

It is not impossible that an economically
powerful China still filled with a sense of
grievance over past wrongs might in the future
want to begin to threaten its neighbors. But apart
from a brief border war with Vietnam in 1989, that
has not been the case in the past. Nor is it now.
For Japan, which inflicted many of those past
wrongs on China and whose Yasukuni shrine
obsession shows that it remains unrepentant about
those wrongs, to condemn China as a threat is
chutzpah - Oriental chutzpah.

Gregory Clark, vice president of
Akita International University, is a former
Australian diplomat.